15. More Sports With Balls #3
Connor looked at the floor. Jonathan suspected he wasn’t actually concentrating, because rubbing a leg with absorbent terry cloth wasn’t a brow-furrowing, jaw-clenching task.
The silence stretched.
Connor took a deep breath. “She thinks I’m kind of not good at dating. I haven’t done much of it, just a lot of hooking up.”
Jonathan straightened from the counter. “Wait, you don’t know how to date either? You?”
Connor’s chin snapped up and their gazes connected. “What do you mean, me?”
“You’re so good at it.” Jonathan waved the small towel. “You bring me coffee, you cook, you have ideas of things to do. You must have done this a lot.”
“Nope.” Connor rose from the floor and retrieved the flapping cotton from Jonathan’s hand, shaking it out and neatly aligning the edges before he turned to the rack.
“But you know what you’re doing!” He stared at Connor’s body, glowing from the extended stay in the hot water and the vigorous toweling. Several droplets of water dripped from Connor’s curls and clung between his shoulders.
Jonathan should be forgiven for his failure to do a thorough job with the towel, because who could, with that ass right there begging to have fingers, palms, everything, run across it. Hair, a neck, or a mere spine had no chance of receiving attention.
“Guess I’m a natural then.”
Connor turned away from the rack, shook out the boxers he’d brought into the bathroom, and stepped into them without looking directly at Jonathan.
Way to make things awkward, Jonathan.
“Does this minor freak out mean you also haven’t dated seriously? Or are you freaking out because I’m a jock?”
“Picked up on that, have you?” Rummaging in his overnight bag for the sleepwear he’d brought meant he didn’t have to continue looking at Connor’s flushed and smirking face.
He’d prepared for tonight by ironing his favorite cotton pajamas to a smooth crispness.
Hopefully his efforts were going to be rewarded.
“I did.” Connor reached out to stroke a finger down Jonathan’s arm.
He realized Connor seized every opportunity to touch him, tiny touches, light touches, flutters just like this.
He would set aside thinking about how parts of this intimacy, specifically the part where he had to share his own messy guts, unsettled him, and focus instead on the fact that Connor wanting to keep a finger or two on his skin felt surprisingly good.
“You have a large to-be-read pile on your bedside table, so I can overlook flaws like team sports prowess. And also, you want me to take you skating, so I will have the opportunity to quite literally skate circles around you. Backwards.”
“You’re avoiding my question.” Connor removed the pajamas from Jonathan’s hands and crouched to hold the crisp cotton pants for Jonathan.
“What was it? I forget.” Standing on one leg, then the other, shouldn’t make his voice sound breathless.
The cause must be feeling Connor’s palms skim his calves, the outside of his knees, his thighs.
Or it was seeing the broad shoulders with their golden freckles and stripes of captured sunshine moving in front of him and hearing the small noise, like a grunt, as Connor stood.
Clearly, the cause of Jonathan’s lost voice was Connor.
“About dating.” He held open the shirt for Jonathan’s arms. This was indeed a full-service establishment.
His dating history wasn’t a nice story, and he hadn’t told anyone except a few people in New York over excessive cocktails. Certainly no one in his new, improved life.
“Double-breasted. I like.” Connor brushed his hand down the front of Jonathan’s pajama shirt, and then he slipped each button into its spot, enclosing Jonathan within the dark blue cotton.
The cool fabric glided across his hot, damp skin.
After the last button, Connor stood and waited for Jonathan’s answer, looking at him with those eyes the color of whiskey in crystal tumblers.
His throat burned, so instead he fixed his gaze on a cluster of freckles on Connor’s left pectoral muscle. Over his heart, approximately. “I did date one person, for about three months, when I lived in New York.”
Connor stood close enough that he easily folded Jonathan to his chest and circled his palm on Jonathan’s back. “What happened?”
Feeling his lips move against the skin of Connor’s shoulder somehow made the words flow.
“I saw him having a lovely afternoon with his wife and kids. All skating together. I’d changed my usual time, I was going to a matinee with friends, so I went skating in the morning and there he was with a woman. There they were. Holding hands.”
He took a big gulping breath of air while Connor kept rubbing his back.
“He’d never held mine. Not walking on the street. Not even across a table. Three months and he’d never touched my hand in public. I assumed he was nervous about gay-bashing or something, but then everything clicked into place.”
That had been the last time he went on the ice at Chelsea Piers.
Hauling himself out to Queens to skate instead had grown harder and harder, and he wasn’t the type of skater to enjoy a garbage session at Bryant Park or ever to touch a blade to the asshole of frozen-over-hell in front of Rockefeller Center.
He’d lost his first relationship and his last chance to be on the ice doing whatever he wanted, playing and skating just for himself, on the same stupid Saturday morning.
“I’m so sorry that happened.” Connor’s arms were tight around him, caging him in or maybe caging the rest of the world out.
He bent his head to Jonathan’s temple and lifted his hands to the damp strands clinging to the back of Jonathan’s neck. His fingers tunneled into Jonathan’s hair and began to squeeze and release his scalp, squeeze and release.
He felt his shoulders slump against the solid wall of Connor.
“So when you saw me with Lauren at the library?”
“I am rather sensitive to that issue.” He sounded like a total prick, he knew it, but he’d always retreated into formality because it was certainly better than crying.
“Guys who want the benefit of a wife to raise their kids and keep their lives running but also want my dick in their ass. No, thank you.”
“I won’t do that to you. Not ever.”
“Just don’t lie to me.” He took as deep of a breath as he could manage in the tight circle of Connor’s arms and tried, really tried, to lower his voice and loosen his spine. “I know I’m sort of a mess, so I can forgive a lot of things in someone else, but not lying. Not ever.”
“I won’t lie to you.”
A tiny leaf unfurled inside Jonathan’s chest, like something poking through the pavement cracks by the library, fragile and too easily uprooted, and yet potentially vigorous.
He didn’t know plants any better than hearts, but he wanted to believe it would grow.
“Then we’ll be fine. Or fine-ish. Something. ”
“What if we went to bed? Would that be fine, fine-ish, or only something?”
Connor laughed at Jonathan’s glare.
They brushed their teeth and made it to bed, with Jonathan pressed to Connor’s broad back in the role of big spoon, before he surprised himself again by returning to the quite-a-bit previous conversation. “You never said why you haven’t dated.”
Perhaps going to watch Connor do a sports thing and then sharing his own trauma curricula vitae had opened the door that led to other risk-taking of the emotional variety. Maybe his former therapist would send him a coffee shop gift card if he told her.
Under Jonathan’s palm, Connor’s chest rose and fell. He sensed that Connor was thinking, but not yet finished with speaking. “I’ve been trying. Since college.”
Connor had graduated at the beginning of the pandemic, so that was one lost year. Even Jonathan knew that four more without a relationship was a long time for someone who was trying. He squeezed Connor tighter.
“I think maybe…”
Jonathan waited, letting his hand press on Connor’s chest. This felt easier without eye contact, but Connor didn’t continue. “Maybe what?”
“Maybe I’m a lot?” His voice was much smaller than the oft-demonstrated capacity of his lungs could produce.
Connor had said things like that about himself more than once, and it made Jonathan more than a little bit stabby that someone, or possibly more than one someone, had hurt this big, beautiful man.
It should never happen. “You mean, you’re so good at everything you try that disgruntled losers get intimidated and run away? I can see that.”
“You know what I mean.” Connor flattened his bigger hand over the one Jonathan had nestled between his pecs, squeezing him to his chest like a security blanket.
The irregular movements of Connor’s awkward, ragged breathing transmitted to Jonathan through his fingertips, so he pressed more tightly to Connor’s back and let his lips find the space behind Connor’s ear.
“I refuse to agree with what you think you mean, but I do think you are a lot. A lot of wonderful.”
They were so close he could hear the tiny sound when Connor swallowed. “I’m an annoying morning person.”
Jonathan wanted names and maybe addresses for whoever had made Connor feel like this. “You bring me coffee. I don’t care what the hell else you do when you’re awake before me.”
He scooted away and tugged Connor into position flat on his back because he was bendy, but not bendy enough to kiss Connor’s face from the little spoon position, and this seemed to be a good time for lips.
“I’ve been told I don’t shut up,” Connor whispered.
“You are guilty of that right now, yes.” Jonathan lowered himself close enough that they could have touched if they duck-lipped.
“Confession. I’ve been told the same. Or rather, that if I couldn’t say something nice, I shouldn’t say anything at all, which felt very much like a shut up at that moment, believe me.
” Their lips drew even closer. “And yet, you listen to me.”
And then they were too close to speak.